A Northern Ireland Childhood - Patrick Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle

Patrick Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle is an unusual, highly original account of life in a Northern Ireland Catholic household. Written from the point of view of Paddy, the eldest son, aged ten, of the Clarke family, it draws the reader through a particular experience of childhood. There is a child’s wonder at the new. There are strange facts about the world to be unearthed and challenges to face like a man.

But when you are ten, there is also always the rock of parents, ma and pa, ma and da, mum and dad on which to rely. Their love for you and their constancy will always offer support and never let you down. Like God, they are not subject to question. So when you do something that was not quite advisable, and as a consequence a window gets broken, or a plant uprooted or an ornament broken, there’s recrimination to expect, of course, perhaps punishment to endure, but it will be fine in the end, because ma and da always make things happen that way. You can trust them, assume their interest, take them for granted.

And that applies even when you beat up your mate, and hit him just a bit too hard. You might say he fell, or stumbled and hit himself hard in an unfortunate place, let blood that spotted his shirt or came home crying in fright, but it would all be fine in the end. When you give your younger brother a dead leg just to keep him in his place, or declare war under the covers after bed time, or even when he messes his pants provoking the others to giggle and mock, there is always home waiting, where there will be safety behind the parental screen. And when you pick a fight because someone says that George Best is not the best footballer in the world, that a teacher you like is a whore or a defenceless sibling ought to get punched, ma and da always step in, mediate, soothe.

Until, that is, you realise your da might not be telling the truth, until you realise that he is just another grown up, perhaps as inconstant and unreliable as all the others. And what about when your ma and da start to fight? The noises percolate through the wall from the other room. They can’t be hidden. Well that’s just called growing up, which is already happening, even – perhaps especially – to a ten year old. And then, of course, there will be adulthood, when everything will be different in a world where people don’t fight, where there will be no conflict.

This is Northern Ireland, after all. Roddy Doyle’s book is a delight. It takes a while to suspend the disbelief associated with becoming a ten year old, even longer to get used to the idea that little Paddy might have written it all down. But the mood and his character soon take over and draw us into a world as fascinating and as threatening as any experienced by an adult.

Rufus And The Biggest Diamond In The World by Michael Elsmere

In Rufus And The Biggest Diamond In The World, Michael Elsmere creates nothing less than a complete fantasy world of children’s literature. Rufus has been told a story by his father about a diamond of a size beyond anyone’s dreams. It is just waiting to be found, so, having lost his parents, Rufus sets out to do precisely that. 

It is a journey of total imagination, a journey through some quintessential scenes of childhood experience, settings of spectacular invention, surely reminiscent of places that many of us might have been. There is a treasure hunt bound for the Spanish Main, an adventure voyage on board ships from a chivalric, Romantic past.

But when the mission is redirected according to an omen unearthed by a submarine hero, Africa becomes the destination that Rufus and his companion, Jim, must explore. If only they could themselves have read the clues that explained how the under-sea horde was transformed into a diamond mine on land. 

In Rufus, Michael Elsmere has invented a wonderful, likeable character, a young lad with an imagination powerful enough to give ideas life and to do so in the most mundane of surroundings. The author also avoids cliché at all times. There are no platitudes of magic potions that appear just as they are required to do exactly what is needed, convenient shrinking or aggrandizement, and no mere description of scene after scene. 

Throughout Rufus And The Biggest Diamond In The World, Michael Elsmere offers elegant prose that provides regularly evocative surprises. It provides a quite beautiful vehicle to explore the power of imagination, to re-experience the joy of discovery. OK kids. Rufus is a good lad. He is perhaps about the same age as you. He’s lost his parents and there’s a diamond to be found. There’s a sailing ship, pirates, treasure, gold, shipwrecks, talking birds, submarines and electric eels. There are eggheads who know how to read things that other people can’t even see. Maps are redrawn in people’s pockets and point to new places. 

There are lions, jungles, snakes, beautiful ladies and witches. There are deserts, oceans, seas, mountains, caves, caverns, stones, stalactites and schools. And so Rufus And The Biggest Diamond In The World becomes itself a celebration of the form in which it exists. It is gentle, subtle writing to convey truly exciting, fast-paced fun. And kids, I suspect a few parents, especially those that might be rendered a little tearful by genuine nostalgia, might enjoy reading Rufus themselves. It’s a book that genuinely inhabits multiple levels, a story that will enrapture the young, and a concept that will fascinate the once young.

But then, when you have read Rufus, you will want to read more, because that is what Rufus is about. These imagined worlds are themselves bigger, greater, more vivid and more real just because they are imagined. 

 View this book on amazon Rufus and the Biggest Diamond in the World

A review of Mukiwa by Peter Godwin

Peter Godwin certainly has a story to tell. It’s a story of an idyllic, if unusual childhood, a disrupted but eventually immensely successful education, military service and then two careers, one in law, planned but aborted, and then one in journalism, discovered almost by default. Listed like this these elements might sound just a bit mundane, perhaps not the subject of memoir. When one adds, however, the location, Rhodesia becoming Zimbabwe, the result is a deeply moving, in places deeply sad, as well as quite disturbing account of a life lived thus far. Mukiwa, by the way, is Shona for white man.

The setting for Peter Godwin’s early years was a middle class, professional and, crucially, liberal family living in eastern Rhodesia, close to the Mozambique border. I had relatives in that same area, near Umtali and Melsetter, and they used to do exactly what the Godwins did regularly which was to visit the Indian Ocean beaches near Beira. We used to get postcards from there every year, usually in the middle of our north of England winter. Envy wasn’t the word…

Peter Godwin’s mother was a doctor and this meant that his childhood was unusual in two respects. Not many youngsters in white households had liberal-minded parents and even fewer helped their mothers conduct post mortems. Unlike most mukiwa, Peter Godwin had black friends. He learned the local language and got to know the bush. He also grew up close to death and then lived alongside it during the years of the war of independence. He describes how the war simply took over everything and labels himself as a technician in its machinations. It’s a telling phrase, admitting that he did not himself want to fight anyone. Like everyone else, he was caught up in the struggle, required to actively perpetrate the violence and that is what he did.

His education was disrupted. His family life was effectively destroyed. And how he managed to keep his sanity during the period I have no idea. He served most of the period in Matebeleland alongside other members of the Rhodesian armed forces and police who were not, to say the least, as liberal as he was. So in some ways he was already doubly a foreigner in that he was working in an area where he could not speak the language and was accompanied by fellow countrymen with whom he shared no beliefs or ideals. And yet he had to fight.

I have never served in a war and hope I never will. But my relatives from the same area as Peter Godwin were also called up into national service and also fought the war. I had not seen them for fifteen years or so when we met after they, along with many thousands of others, as recorded by Peter Godwin, had already fled south. But for them also memories of war were deep and resented scars. It was a bloody and dirty war where, if you were lucky, you could at most trust your closest colleagues. It was a vicious conflict at times and left everyone angry. No-one won. Everyone suffered.

Having eventually achieved the education he sought, Peter Godwin attempted to launch a legal career. But then, almost by default, he became a reporter. After independence, he learned of atrocities perpetrated by the Zambabwean army in the area where he had served during the war. He investigated. He reported. And then, on advice, he fled.

But he did eventually return to all of the areas he knew and the last part of the book is a moving and deeply sad account of how little he recognised in the places he loved as a child. But within this, there is a moment of hope as he meets a former freedom fighter and, with humour and new friendship, the two of them realise that they had not only been enemies, but had actually been two commanders trying to kill one another on opposite sides of the same skirmish.

But in the end, Peter Godwin is changed man, and his home and homeland, at least as he had experienced them, were no more. War had changed everything and everyone. No-one won.